Team says it’s found evidence universe ‘inflated’ right after Big Bang

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File 2007/Steffen Richter

A three-year scan of a tiny portion of the sky with the BICEP2 telescope (foreground) at the South Pole detected evidence of the universe’s initial, faster-than-light growth spurt, scientists say.

FROM WIRE REPORTS

Published: 17 March 2014 11:03 PM

Updated: 17 March 2014 11:06 PM

NEW YORK — The universe was born 13.8 billion years ago, exploding into existence in an event called the Big Bang. Now researchers say they’ve spotted evidence that a split-second later, the expansion of the cosmos began with a powerful jump-start.

Experts called the discovery a major advance, if it is confirmed by others. Although many scientists already thought that an initial, extremely rapid growth spurt happened, finding the evidence has been a key goal in the study of the universe. Researchers reported Monday that they did it by peering into the faint light that remains from the Big Bang.

If verified, the discovery “gives us a window on the universe at the very beginning,” when it was far less than one-trillionth of a second old, said theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work.

“It’s just amazing,” he said. “You can see back to the beginning of time.”

Another outside expert, physicist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the finding already suggests that some ideas about the rapid expansion of the universe can be ruled out.

Right after the Big Bang, the universe was a hot soup of particles. It took about 380,000 years to cool enough that the particles could form atoms, then stars and galaxies. Billions of years later, planets formed from gas and dust that was orbiting stars. The universe has continued to spread out.

Krauss said he thinks the new finding could rank with the greatest discoveries of the last 25 years about the universe, such as that the universe’s expansion is accelerating.

The new results were announced by a group that includes researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The team, led by John Kovac of Harvard, reported its results in a scientific briefing at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., on Monday and in a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

For their research, astronomers scanned about 2 percent of the sky with a telescope at the South Pole. They were looking for a specific pattern in light waves within the faint microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The pattern has long been considered evidence of the rapid growth spurt, known as inflation. Kovac called it “the smoking-gun signature of inflation.”

The results are the closely guarded distillation of three years’ worth of observations and analysis. Eschewing email for fear of a leak, Kovac personally delivered drafts of his work to a select few.

“It was a very special moment, and one we took very seriously as scientists,” Kovac said.

By last weekend, as social media was buzzing with rumors that inflation had been seen and as news spread, astrophysicists responded with a mixture of jubilation and caution.

Krauss said it’s possible that the light-wave pattern is not a sign of inflation, although he stressed that it’s “extremely likely” that it is. It’s “our best hope” for a direct test of whether the rapid growth spurt happened, he said.

Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 13.8 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.

In our own universe, it would serve as a window into the forces operating at energies forever beyond the reach of particle accelerators on Earth and would yield new insights into gravity itself. Kovac’s ripples would be the first direct observation of gravitational waves, which, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should ruffle space-time.

Krauss and other experts said the results must be verified by other observations, a standard caveat in science.

But corroboration might not be long in coming. The European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which has been making exquisite measurements of the Big Bang microwaves, will be reporting its own findings this year. At least a dozen other teams are attempting similar measurements from balloons, mountaintops and space.

Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University who didn’t participate in the work, called the detection of the light-wave pattern “huge news” for the study of the cosmos.

“It’s not every day you wake up and learn something completely new about the early universe,” he said.

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